After the team and Max Verstappen get off to a rocky start in 2025 though, Horner finally gets the chop. 

“I’ve had something taken away from me,” he bleats in the trailer, with Christian Klien, Scott Speed, Sébastien Bordais, Daniil Kvyaat, Nyck de Vries, Brendon Hartley, Alex Albon, Pierre Gasly, Sergio Perez, Liam Lawson and Yuki Tsunoda no doubt tuning in to see how this one played out in the paddock.

This is an interesting watershed moment from DtS. Some say the slightly vacuous Daniel Ricciardo was largely the key personality to its success. This is wrong, it’s been Horner. 

If not terrifying those under his own control at Red Bull, Horner lays down the judgement on others on the grid too while in the DtS chair, usually with quite amusing results i.e. comparing Williams boss James Vowles to a vicar etc. You can’t quite see Ayao Komatsu or Laurent Mekies cracking the same jokes.

Horner has demonstrated exactly why DtS helped make F1 more popular through being an entertaining villain who says what he thinks, and then to some extent becoming a victim of that success in being binned off by his own team for being too non-politically correct. 

The pain of being Lando Norris

Poor Lando Norris has gone from F1’s happy-go-lucky, actually-quite-amusing young star to being so screwed up under the pressure he looks like he wants to cry most of the time. 

Add in to the mix a large part of the F1 fan base has decided to demonise him as the ultimate posh boy racer (slightly mystifying as to what the other 21 on the grid are then), it feels as though the Somerset racer is fighting misery on several fronts most of the time. 

The Brit, after commenting years previously that most drivers could win if they had the car performance advantage Lewis Hamilton enjoyed for many years, has also been depicted as someone who couldn’t get the job done when he himself finally had the car to win. In other words, a ‘bottler’. 

We’re likely to go deep into the poshest-posh boy’s psyche as he suffered his early-2025 dip, and then slightly miraculous comeback following his devastating Dutch GP retirement. 

Some have speculated from the outside that Norris is McLaren’s favourite over Oscar Piastri (boss Zak Brown was part of his management team before he joined the team). We’ll look for evidence of this in DtS S8. 

Doohan’s demise

From the moment Flavio Briatore swept back into Enstone Godfather-syle, it looked like Jack Doohan’s days were numbered. 

His chilling “I control the Jack” comment from Season 7 seemed to hardly fill the Alpine driver with confidence, backed up by the absolute crashfest that was the Australian’s first six races of 2025. 

In the new trailer, Briatore admits he enjoys sacking people if he deems them not up to the job. There’s probably more than a few people that fall into that category, then…

Was Doohan always doomed because the Italian boss simply didn’t like him, and did Franco Colapinto ’s large South American backing have an influence too? We’ll let the prospective Sherlock Holmes’ in the audience come to their own conclusions after watching.

There’s also the small matter of team principal Oliver Oakes suddenly exiting the team overnight too. 

Rocky start

After getting a transfer from Liverpool to Juventus, ‘80s football star Ian Rush famously commented that Italy was ‘a bit like a foreign country’. 

Lewis Hamilton’s reaction to the early days of his Ferrari move weren’t dissimilar. Everything was different from a British team now – how surprising! 

Things weren’t helped by the Scuderia’s famously obtuse pit strategies and team radio observations, leading to open tension between the legendary squad and the ‘Goat’ driver it had on its hands. 

Hopefully DtS will reveal more of the spat in greater detail. 

Behind the scenes of F1 75

For the first time ever, the world championship laid on a glitzy, pop concert-style season launch at London’s 02 Arena to launch the new season, in recognition of the series’ 75th anniversary. 

Each team had its own presentation for its 2025, usually led by a influencer-cum-presenter and with an awkward, angular soundtrack and light show. 

In between the presentations were musical performances by ‘90s British pop stars Take That, rap artist Machine Gun Kelly and country & western singer Kane Brown.

Some moments of the show were OK, some were god-awful, and others were even worse. 

But what happened behind the velvet curtain? Which driver had a tantrum over their wardrobe malfunction? Who didn’t want to play ball with a daft onstage gimmick?

And did Red Bull swerve its driver interviews because it knew it would get booed out of South-East London?

It will be fascinating to see if we get any insight into F1’s historic, sequin-studded event. 

Miscellaneous happenings

In the trailer, Gabriel Borotleto lets rip into a microphone, the Mercedes drivers do their best depressed-on-the-tube impression, and Isack Hadjar emerges roaring out of a hot tub – there’s presumably some kind of metaphor in there.